The outline of Murray's life is rather prosaic - born in Baltimore, Md. to middle-class parents of mixed racial stock, Murray's mother died when she was 3 years old. Unable to care for 6 children, her father allowed Murray to be adopted by an aunt. Murray graduated from high school in 1926, then spent an additional year preparing for college. In 1928, she entered Hunter College in New York, graduating in 1933 during the depth of the Depression. She would return to school periodically throughout her life.

      In 1944 she received an LL. B. from Howard University Law School and in 1945 she received an LL. M. from Boalt Hall of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1965, she was the first Black person to be awarded a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale University Law School. Finally in 1976, turning away from the law and toward religion, she completed an Master of Divinity degree from General Theological Seminary.

      Murray's devotion to Civil Rights began as a struggle to overcoming segregation. After graduating from college, Murray worked for the National Urban League, the Works Progress Administration, and the Workers Defense League. Immersed in an interracial, interfaith community that formed the Civil Rights movement of the 1930s, Murray could envision the possibilities of interracial solidarity. Jailed while returning home to North Carolina from New York for refusing to sit on the broken seats on the back of the bus, Murray continued to defend workers.

      Here's how Kerber tells the story of Murray's entrance to Howard University Law School.

      As field secretary for the Workers Defense League, Murray raised money for the defense of Odell Waller, a black sharecropper who had killed his white employer in a bitter fight over the seizure of his crop and was sentenced to death. In 1940 Virginia, jury lists were drawn from voting lists, and voting required the payment of a poll tax. The tax, as intended, put voting far out of the reach of virtually all sharecroppers. "So you had," Murray remembered many years later, "a poll tax jury which, for all practical purposes, was a planters' jury."
      The Workers Defense League sent Murray to Richmond, to make an appeal for contributions at a meeting of the Negro Ministers Alliance. To her chagrin she found that she would be preceded on the program by Leon Ransom, acting dean of the Howard Law School, and Thurgood Marshall, who were asking for money to support the defense of four black men accused of raping a white woman; no one in the audience could have missed the fear of another Scottsboro case. But Murray made a moving speech; it was one of the rare occasions on which she dissolved in tears in public, and the ministers opened their pockets to her. "[B]ack at the hotel Dr. Ransom . . . and I [were] just kind of, you know, rapping back and forth, [and I] said, 'Well look, if I'm going to be messing around with these cases, I might as well study law.' He said, 'Come on, we'd loved to have you.' I said, 'give me a fellowship and I will.' He says, 'OK., I'll give you a fellowship' . . . sure enough, he went and sent me the papers.' Pauli Murray entered Howard University Law School that fall, Waller was executed in 1942. (1, pp. 186-187)

      An integrationist in the 1930s and 1940s even while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was still working on the equal part of the separate-but-equal policy, Murray developed pioneering arguments to use the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to fight discriminatory legislation. (3) In 1951, she wrote States' Laws on Race and Color for the Women's Division of the Methodist Church, a work which Thurgood Marshal labeled the Bible of the Civil Rights movement. (4) Like many African Americans involved in the civil rights movement during the McCarthy era, Murray suffered. In 1952 she lost a post at Cornell University because the people who had supplied her references, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Philip Randolph, were considered to be too radical. Murray spent the rest of the 1950s working on various aspects of the Civil Rights movement when not writing a family memoir, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956), in which she discussed the lives of her slave grandparents.

      In 1961, Murray was appointed to the President's Commission on the Status of Women Committee (PCSW) on Civil and Political Rights. Murray linked the civil rights movement with the federal quest for equity for women. Her task on the Commission was to survey the law and to recommend a way to use the Fourteenth Amendment to overturn "protective" legislation which in fact protected women only from good paying jobs, while unaffecting truly protective legislation. Once again Murray compiled a list of laws that discriminated, this time against women. The length of the list and the scope of the laws (divorce, child custody, immigration, naturalization, tax, eligibility for credit, choice of domicile, access to unemployment, jury service, etc.) convinced many women that relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than litigating each law, one case at a time, was the practical approach to bringing equality to women. The ground-breaking PSCW report of 1963, American Women: Report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women, stimulated governors across the nation to create similar commissions in their own states to review state laws and policies regarding women. At the time, Pauli identified the limitations on jury service by women and women's educational opportunities as the greatest impediments to women's legal equality.

      The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sex. Perhaps sensing an opportunity, in her article "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII" in the George Washington Law Review, Murray stressed employment issues as "the most serious discrimination against both women and Negroes today." (1, 193) In 1966, along with Betty Friedan and about 30 other women, she co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), "the NAACP for women," to force the government to enforce the anti-sex discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act. Murray co-authored the statement of purpose for the new organization.

      Murray joined the Equality Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) where she sought to completely revise the ACLU policy on sex discrimination. She wanted the ACLU "to focus on the guarantees of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, for due process and for equal treatment under the law, and to initiate litigation to eliminate discrimination based on sex in "jury service, the criminal law, domestic relations law, public education." " (1, p. 194)

      Building on the work of Dorothy Kenyon, a leading feminist and civil lights lawyer in her own right as well as an ACLU member since 1931, Murray laid the intellectual ground work for the next generation of civil rights activists. In 1971, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the head the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. Building on the arguments that Kenyon and Murray had developed, Ginsburg would play a prominent role in court cases which overturned many of the discriminatory laws in the middle 1970s.

      In an era when the white male power brokers attempted to pit one outsider group against another as a way of keeping all outsider groups outside of the system, Murray worked hard to diffuse the tension between white women and Negroes. Some black activists saw her attempts to end "Jane Crow" along with "Jim Crow" as casting her lot with white women. After passing the baton to a younger generation, Murray turned her attention to religion as a way of forging links between white women and black men and women.

      It is interesting to speculate about the influence of the 19th century suffragists on the sex discrimination cases of the 1970. Gage, Minor, and others developed an unsuccessful legal approach to using the Fourteenth Amendment to acquire suffrage for women. Although their court case failed, the arguments and their interpretation of constitutional law continued to be disseminated by the woman's suffrage movement. Kenyon was a suffragist in her youth and she came from a family of lawyers. A lawyer in her own right, it is hard to imagine that she was not familiar with suffragist arguments regarding the Fourteenth Amendment and woman suffrage. It is also hard to imagine that a bright lawyer would not figure out a way to generalize the argument to apply it to broad categories of legal restrictions on women. We know that Kenyon and Murray, both separately and together, profoundly influenced Ginsburg. And so, it is tempting to ask ourselves, can we conclude that the work of the 19th century feminists eventually bore fruit in the woman's rights cases of the 1970s?

      For her pioneering work on civil rights laws for minority men and women's rights laws for women, Murray earned her place among the Most Influential Women of the Millennium. Yet, it is fitting and proper that two other women's rights activists names be mentioned along with Murray's - Dorothy Kenyon and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one a predecessor of and the other a successor to Murray.

References:

      (1) Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, [New York: Hill and Wang, 1998] pp. 185- 199,

      (2) Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol 2 M-Z [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993] pp. 825-826

      (3) Fighting Jane Crow from The Nation, May 23, 1987 pp. 689-690 by Paula Giddings

      (4) Anna Pauli Murray

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